Sep 24, 2012

Chip maker Intel is working on new flavors of its Medfield processor for mobile devices, including LTE-capable versions of the silicone.

The company claims that it will be able to showcase the first 4G-capable chips before the end of this year, and that they will be included in products in 2013. Intel has been long showing interest in the smartphone market, yet the first handsets powered by its CPUs were made official only in 2012. The latest of these was the Motorola RAZR i, an Android-based handset capable of delivering 2GHz of raw power. The availability of LTE-enabled Medfield processors will help the company gain some more ground on the smartphone market, while also allowing it to storm the Android tablet segment. To ensure its success in this area, the company is also looking for the launch of dual-core versions of the processor, Intel confirmed to TechCrunch. Sumeet Syal, Intel’s director of product marketing confirmed not only the upcoming availability of LTE chips, but also the fact that the company has multi-core CPUs in the pipeline.

He also noted that the hyper threading technology that Intel is using will provide users with increased performance levels even on a smaller number of cores. “You have to take a look at how many instructions per clock can the architecture handle — our belief is that others are throwing cores at the issue in terms of getting more performance,” he said. “We make that determination based on our architecture so we felt very comfortable coming out with a single core dual-threaded for our first product, and as we’re able to get more and more performance in the right implementation of the architecture we believe putting in dual-core would be the right thing for our next generation product,” he continued.

The company is also likely to look into application compatibility issues that currently prevent some software in the Google Play Store to be installed on devices powered by its chips.